In talking to my friend Al Paulson recently, it turned out we have a common problem. We can’t give away scholarships. What a shame.

In the modern age of computers, scholarships are everywhere, it seems.FastWeb, the most popular scholarship site, has over 1.5 million entries in its database. Other websites such asScholarships.comhave similar numbers. But it’s hard to give them away, let me tell you. I have been doing it for 42 years, and we never have enough applicants.

Al Paulsen who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota founded Marketplace Productions 20 years ago. After he had some success in business, he and other members of the Minnesota American Indian Chamber of Commerce decided to launch an Indian scholarship program. But for almost a decade now, he has had trouble gettingNative American studentsto apply for it.

To learn about more scholarships, here is where to learn about the American Indian College Fund’s Scholarship’s, and NIEA has a great listing here. Catching the Dream also has an article on how to find and win scholarships here.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a bill into law to prevent California schools from expelling students for willfully defying school authorities. The legislation signed Saturday aims to put an end to a punishment that activists say is unevenly applied and disproportionately affects minority students.

Until now, state law has given school officials discretion to decide what constitutes willful defiance of a supervisor, teacher, administrator or other school employee. They can suspend students or recommend them for expulsion for such behavior. The new law removes the discretion and instead would divert disruptive students to in-school suspensions intended to help them. Schools still could expel students for violating school rules or laws and could suspend students for willful defiance of authorities in grades 4 through 12.

As we posted earlier, Michigan State University is hosting its 2014 Indigenous Law Conference, which will take place on November 20-21, 2014. The theme for the the 2014 annual conference is “Dismantling Barriers in American Indian Education.” Melody McCoy from the Native American Rights Fund will be presenting on Tribal Education Agencies in Federal, Tribal, and State Law. As many of you know Melody was instrumental in TEDNA’s creation. Melody’s conference materials are here, and her powerpoint is here.

You can also see Melody’s previous work in the Tribalizing Indian Education Series, here for free.

Death by suicide is senseless, awful, and sorrowful in every way. We’re not here to glorify suicide, we’re here to talk about it. Because it needs to be addressed.

To clarify the context of Mr. Alexie’s quote, he wasn’t referring to any personal contemplation of suicide when he said this. He was talking about how he dealt with—or was unable to deal with—deaths within his own family. He wailed, he cried, he lost control. He expresses a memory of confusion regarding the appropriateness of his own coping methods, and the fact that other people seemed to have an opinion on whether or not he was doing it right. It’s relevant to this suicide conversation, because it calls into question the idea of how to grieve.

It’s easy to take translations for granted when Google can swap between Albanian and Zulu with the click of a button, but even that tech has real world limitations. Marie Wilcox is the last fluent speaker of Wukchumni, one of 130 different endangered Native American languages in the United States that don’t have any kind of digital—or analog—legacy.

Over the course of seven years in California’s San Joaquin Valley, she worked with her daughter and grandson to catalog everything she knows about the language. First, she hand-scrawled memories on scraps of paper; then, she hunt-and-pecked on an old keyboard to complete a dictionary and type out legends like “How We Got Our Hands.” Next, she recorded the whole thing on audio for pronunciation—it’s very specific!—and posterity.